Aviya Kushner is the Forward’s language columnist and the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb and The Grammar of God.
Aviya Kushner
By Aviya Kushner
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Culture How the Capitol riots changed the way we talk about insurrection
In the aftermath of an unprecedented second impeachment following a violent attack on the Capitol that left five dead, some language themes are emerging. One immediate question that affects all of us: Did the riot reflect the views of the “fringe?” Or was it a natural outgrowth of increasingly mainstream views and behavior? Fringe or…
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Culture In Hebrew, ‘impeachment’ has the power to clean and restore us
Every article on impeachment insists that “impeach” does not mean to “remove” — but rather, in a quasi-Talmudic tone, the word means to “officially state the charges against a public official.” As law bloggers scrambled to parse the parameters of an “impeachable” offense, sounding a lot like the rabbis of two thousand years ago, the…
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Culture No, the Trump Twitter ban isn’t ‘Orwellian’ – Stop saying it is.
Events that have been taking place in Washington will force dystopian novelists to try a little harder to imagine the collapse of civilization. When Twitter permanently banned President Donald Trump’s social account in the aftermath of the violent riot that took over Capitol Hill, sending members of Congress into hiding and reporters fleeing for cover,…
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Culture The danger when Nazis think of their victims as numbers, not people
It’s rare for a journalist to have the opportunity to interview the person who harassed him on television. Johnny Roman Garza was sentenced to 16 months in federal prison for putting a threatening poster up on the home of the editor of a prominent Jewish newspaper in Arizona and attempting to do the same thing…
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Culture Even dictionaries couldn’t keep up with language in 2020
So much happened in 2020 that not even the Word of the Year folks at the Oxford English Dictionary could come up with just one word to describe the past year; instead, the august dictionary folks issued a 38-page report on “words of an unprecedented year” — complete with colorful bar charts distilling how we…
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Opinion The right demonized journalists. Now they’re turning on scientists.
I am no longer shocked when I receive an email with a photo of my face super-imposed on an image of crematoria; like many other Jewish writers, and many other women journalists, disgusting harassment is the norm. But now, it’s scientists who are becoming a primary target; a chilling new article in The Boston Globe…
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Culture A Jewish poet of survival, Louise Glück is an incredibly timely Nobel choice
For new readers and longtime readers, one of the great pleasures of Glück’s work is following her progression as a poet
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Culture Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis has a Biblical precedent
President Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis and subsequent quarantine has got me thinking about the dramatic life of Uzziah, King of Judah, who contracted tsara’at — traditionally translated as leprosy, and who is described in II Chronicles as making a power grab that led to contracting a contagious disease that required quarantine. Uzziah’s reign, from c. 791–739…
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